I’m really into green energy. I’d love to have solar panels. I’ve had solar energy companies check out our place so we could get them. Each time I’ve been told it wouldn’t be worth it. The reason is we have a passive solar designed home which uses a minimum of electricity. We have no natural gas here as PG&E simply neglected to put gas lines down our little road which goes to six homes. We typically use roughly $60 of electricity per month in the summer and $90 worth in the winter. I’ve been told straight up that, even with all the rebates (well, they’re over now) it wouldn’t be worth it because what electricity we use is mostly at night and we wouldn’t be saving any money with solar panels.
It short, I’ve been told we’d be paying for the things for 20+ years ourselves and not from the savings in our electrical use. What that means is we’d be actually paying for a solar system that would almost entirely be making electricity for PG&E at our expense. The whole solar panel deal is really worth it for folks that spend $250 or more per month on electricity (around here that means folks that have air conditioning. We have no HVAC of any sort).
It would be different if we bought a garage full of batteries to store the juice. As you know, all the electricity made by power companies is AC, which cannot be stored. When it’s made, it’s used or completely lost forever. Because of that, power companies do their best to make only as much electricity as needed to meet the demand for juice at any given moment. If they can’t make enough, they start “rolling brown outs” which means they shut down parts of their grid for a couple hours or so at a time then move on to the next area...wash, rinse, repeat. This happens in California in the summer time.
Of course you can store DC current in batteries which are a big pain in the ass to be honest. I have a friend who built a home completely off the grid because she had to. There is no electricity or natural gas lines where she built. She has a room the size of a two-car garage filled with batteries. They look like typical car batteries but are about five times larger. She has to keep checking them every month to top them off and make sure they have the right mix of acid and electrolytes. She has to clean off her solar panels every month since just a little film of dust or pollen really reduces their efficiency.
Tesla has made a huge, single battery to store electricity. It can store enough to power an entire home. They are really great. inhabitat.com/… Unfortunately some states have outright banned them and punish folks that install solar panels by charging them a penalty fee that makes it more expensive to have them vs. not having them. I honestly dislike these places and their GOP overlords. These goobers have even made it illegal to buy a Tesla car directly (West Virginia and Michigan come to mind).
Well, here’s a great idea. In Nevada a company has come up with a very interesting solution to storing DC current made by solar panels without batteries (wha?). They have a bunch of train cars filled with cement that weigh something like 9 tons each. The energy created is used in real time, but what isn’t used is “stored” by going into making the train cars go uphill using that extra energy to run electric motors. When the energy is needed, the train cars come back downhill generating electricity in reverse...those same electric motors generate electricity from the potential energy stored.
How brilliant. Remember Physics from high school? Well, I sure do. Learned a hell of a lot and it stuck (I love science). Remember taking a bowling ball up to the roof of school and dropping it to the ground then having to figure out how much potential energy (the ball lugged up to the roof had stored energy which was the energy it took to haul it up there) was converted into kinetic energy (the stored, potential energy that was released when you dropped the sucker). Well, this is exactly the concept behind this ingenious way of storing solar energy without batteries.
What do you want to kibitz about tonight?